Kiswahili

Sarah Baartman Hall (formerly Memorial Hall) at The University of Cape Town
[Mike Hutchings/Reuters]

Tafi Mhaka is calling for the adoption of Kiswahili as an official language of all the countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania have already done so. Most Africa countries adopted French, English or Portuguese, the languages of the European colonizers as their official language. At the time, it was probably the expedient thing to do, but times have changed. Note he doesn't say anything about removing the official status of the European languages, only that they add Kiswahili. 

Near as I can tell, Kiswahili is just another one of these respellings of Swahili, Beijing instead of Peking, or Kyiv instead of Kiev. You can call your foreign names anything you want, but why can't they leave the English spellings alone? We aren't going to pronounce it correctly no matter how you spell it, and it just means more time and effort will be wasted on replacing perfectly cromulent words with new and different words that are no better than the originals.

One line stuck out in Tafi's essay:

It didn’t help matters that at the time everyone marvelled at then-Prime Minister Robert Mugabe’s impeccable command of English and observers in the West regarded him as “one of the world’s great orators”. 

Robert Mugabe might have been a great speaker (the Wikipedia article uses the word 'speech' twelve times), but I think he was few marbles short of a full deck. In particular I suspect he was missing the economics marble.

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Sarah Baartman Hall at the University of Cape Town
Look at those stairs. There must be a zillion steps.

I was surprised by the picture of Memorial Hall that accompanied Tafi's essay. I know I shouldn't be surprised, but I was. It makes sense that there would be a very English building on the campus, I mean the English ran this place for a long time. On the other hand the images that South Africa brings to mind are either a thriving metropolis or miles of shantytowns, not staid enclaves of academia.

Saartjie Baartman, aka Sarah Baartman, 1810

Which brings us to Sarah Baartman. The University of Cape Town renamed Memorial Hall to Sarah Baartman Hall back in 2018. Sarah Baartman (c.1789– 29 December 1815) was exhibited as a freak show attraction in 19th-century Europe under the name Hottentot Venus. She was exhibited for a few years but was eventually discarded. She died at the age of 26 in Paris.